23/03/2023 - The film centre is backing 59 film projects, including Guillaume Senez’s Une part manquante and Laurent Micheli’s Nino dans la nuit

Directors Guillaume Senez (left, © Magritte Awards) and Laurent Micheli

In its final session of 2022, the Wallonia-Brussels Federation Film Centre awarded aid to 59 film projects - including 28 feature-length works - to the tune of 3.75 million euros.

Standing out among the projects supported in the production process is Une part manquante, the third feature film by Guillaume Senez which should once again see him joining forces with Romain Duris, who made an impression in Senez’s previous film Our Struggles [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Guillaume Senez
film profile]. The movie follows the fractured fate of French national Jay who crosses paths with his granddaughter Lily, who he hasn’t seen for years, just as he’s getting ready to leave Japan where he’s been living for over a decade. The film shines a light on the highly complex nature of child custody in Japan following divorce. This new project will also see Guillaume Senez teaming up with Versus Production for the very first time.

For his part, Laurent Micheli is sticking with Wrong Men for production support, following the success of Lola [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Laurent Micheli
film profile] in 2019. For his third feature film, the director has decided to adapt Capucine and Simon Johannin’s novel Nino dans la nuit, which follows the hesitations and at times desperate acts carried out by Nino and his friends in their bid to live rather than survive. Hired for dirty, badly paid casual work at parties full of drugs which come in all letters of the alphabet, Nino and his friends try to find their place in a world which doesn’t seem to leave much room for hope.

Two first feature films have also been granted support in production: Le jour qui vient by Manon Coubia, who’s a producer (notably of Nicolas Rincon Gille’s movies), as well as an actress and a director of short films such as Marée and L’immense retour; and L’âge mur by Jean-Benoît Ugeux, an actor recently seen in the series Paris Police 1900 and in Delphine Lehericey’s Last Dance [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Delphine Lehericey
film profile] who’s also the author of numerous short films, and the winner, several weeks ago, of the Magritte for Best Short Documentary Film thanks to Arbres.

The film centre will likewise be throwing its weight behind several international feature films. Aude-Léa Rapin’s new movie Planète B - a co-production between Les Films du Bal (France) and Wrong Men (Belgium) on which shooting has just commenced - has also been selected for aid in this latest session, alongside Vasilis Kekatos’ Greek title Our Wildest Days (a co-production between Greek firms Incognita and Blackbird Production, French outfit Tripode and Belgium’s Hélicotronc) and the latest directorial effort by the man behind Custody [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Xavier Legrand
film profile], Xavier Legrand, whose family-focused thriller Le Successeur [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Xavier Legrand
film profile] homes in on a young man who wonders what his father has left him in his will (a co-production carried by KG Productions in France and by Stenola Productions in Belgium).

Last but not least, the film centre’s aid will also be winging its way to no fewer than seven feature films in development, including Nabil Ben Yadir’s new movie (whose latest film, Animals [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Nabil Ben Yadir
film profile], has just been released in France) and Jessica Woodworth’s latest title (who just presented her impressive movie Luka [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Jessica Woodworth
film profile], a loose adaptation of Buzzati’s The Tartare Steppe, at the Rotterdam Film Festival).

(Translated from French)